That being said - is this in direct competition with other definitions of open hardware licensing? I know of "Creative Commons" but does that fully encompass the Open Source HW definition? It seems the OSHW would also include all "source files" necessary to create the hardware.

Last edited by Auchtung on Mon Feb 14, 2011 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

It's pretty important to remember that this is a definition, while when folks use Creative Commons for their projects, that's a license. Creative Commons works alright, and Wayne and Layne licenses our hardware design files under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/) and our original software under GPL.

However, there's nothing in CC-BY-SA that requires the files we distribute to be editable, and not just Gerbers. It's a key point of the OSHW definition that the distributed files need to be source files, not Gerbers/photomask which are roughly equivalent to compiled down object files. Of course, we have distributed the source files since day one of Wayne and Layne, as well as ... most... of the OSHW companies and folks out there.

One of the next steps is to create a variety of licenses to actually apply to hardware files that satisfy the definition. A lot of folks are clamoring for a editable OSHW license--where the tools you use to create the OSHW file must be Open Source, or a less restrictive version where the tools you use to create the OSHW file must create a non-proprietary export file that fully contains all the information needed to recreate the file.

adamwolf wrote:However, there's nothing in CC-BY-SA that requires the files we distribute to be editable, and not just Gerbers. It's a key point of the OSHW definition that the distributed files need to be source files, not Gerbers/photomask which are roughly equivalent to compiled down object files.

Adam,

Thanks for the great summary and state of things as they stand today.

I think it's great (and necessary) that OSHW does require easily obtainable source files that are editable.

I myself am not too familiar with the process of fully disclosing all source files for hardware. I'm guessing there's a bit of a learning curve one has to go through just to make a nice, scalable set of source files that anyone can read, understand, and easily modify.

This whole idea has me thinking about the concept of a SPIME -- coined by Bruce Sterling in his book Shaping Things. Ideally anything created would be planned, and designed, to be cradle-to-cradle. That way the creative process would not contribute to excessive physical waste during the evolution of a physical design.

By no means is it comprehensive, but it's a start. Please feel free and be encouraged to build upon this page as you come across useful open source tools to do the job of Open Source Hardware Development!